It’s a concept where, two or three times a year, any Disney employee can present an idea for a full-length feature animation before Michael Eisner,CEO and chairman of the board, and Roy Disney, vice chairman of the board, and other executives. Hercules, the animated film, for example, came about from an animator’s idea that was presented at a Gong Show. The company benefits because they get thousands of good ideas from their employees, some of which are developed into feature films. And the employees benefit because they know they have the freedom to submit ideas that will be listened to. Even if their idea is “gonged,” they celebrate it and learn from it.

The Little Mermaid and Pocahontas also came out of Gong Show meetings. Eisner also held “charettes” — meetings with architects and theme park designers, whom he liked because they were “so brutally honest.” When developing movies and TV shows, he’d often hold meetings that lasted 10+ hours (“the longer, the better”).

Eventually everybody gets hungry, and tired, and angry, and eager to leave. But everybody also becomes equal. There is no pecking order. All of a sudden it gets really creative. You may have a ten-hour meeting, but it’s during the last half hour that the best ideas come out…Sometimes you have to be worn out and burnt out to become authentic and original.

Oof. It must suck to have so much corporate hierarchy that you need to meet for the length of an Isner-Mahut Wimbledon match to reach a point where co-workers can talk to each other like equals.

Nick Campbell

on 24 Jun 10

Sadly, the first thing I thought was good for them for finding a way to break down the corporate hierarchy even if it was painful. As well as creating an opportunity to solicit ideas from all over the company that is then actually implemented.

Although I wouldn’t take the Eisner era to be the way Disney typically works. That seems more like the way Disney almost became obsolete. Good example of multiple issues and solutions though.

I don’t think the 10 hour meetings have really anything to do with breaking down the corporate hierarchy necessarily, it’s more just really what it says, taking the time to become more authentic and original. To give time for the egos to settle and get to the true heart of the matter.

Ever have an argument with your wife or girlfriend? No hierarchy there, but still takes time (sometimes more than 10 hours) to break beyond the egos to get to a point of moving forward.

Hashing it out, sometimes just simply works.

Kevin

on 24 Jun 10

Agree completely with Mark. This isn’t about breaking down corporate hierarchy, it’s about getting a bunch of busy people working on disparate things together for the right amount of time to get to a good idea. That’s easy when you’re a company of 8 people, not so easy when you’re Disney.

From page 227: “We also believe in diversity, because the more diverse you are as an organization, the more diverse are the opinions which get expressed, which sometimes creates friction, and friction slows down the machine. If it is sliding along with no friction, you get easy solutions: you get mediocrity”.

Given that Eisner would apparently invite even the theme parks imagineers to a movie pre-production meeting because of their “brutally honest” feedback, I hold that this wasn’t about hierarchy (hierarchy hosted the meeting after all), but rather the folks writing the millions of dollars worth of checks for this potential project holding the young ones asking for this money to prove their case.

Mike Hagstrom

on 24 Jun 10

You forgot to mention that these “Eisner” type meetings are almost the way Pixar went bankrupt. Their idea was initially rejected so they had to go independent for a while and have success before Disney wanted anything to do with them.

Looking to Eisner’s Disney as an example of good management isn’t exactly a good idea. Eisner fancied himself a creative and inserted himself in the creative process for films. Katzenberg was the same way, but at least he was better at spotting good stories.

Eisner should have hired someone that knew what they were doing with films and allowed them to control it, but his ego was too big not to be involved. Neither Katzenberg nor Eisner (but especially Eisner) had much respect for the animators and directors, and wouldn’t give them creative license. Those long meetings are symptoms of it.

Pixar works much differently. Unless a production is completely failing, they give the director almost complete control of the film. Eisner created an environment of fear, whereas Pixar’s environment is one of creativity and mutual respect.

Kalin

Eisner gets a lot of crap for being a failure toward the end of his tenure, but I think that crap is misplaced. His only failure was the inability to adapt over time. Prior to that lack of adaptation, he went a long way toward building the company and there was a renaissance for hand-drawn animation under his watch.

As much of a Rework Kool-Aid® drinker as I am, one of the things that get lost in the anti-meeting big-corporate-sucks stuff is that there are often much larger bets being made in big companies with a lot more money at stake. In software development, we often have the luxury of small teams, agile processes and the ability to adapt and change quickly. That’s not as easy when you have to commit tens of millions of dollars to a movie (particularly in the era when home video couldn’t save a budget). It’s even harder when you want to do something really expensive, like build an airplane. You’ve gotta have some pretty strong evidence that you’re going to make the invested money back, and that vetting process, however wrong or right it is, often comes out of big process.

If code “refactoring is [the process of making] a change to the internal structure of software to make it easier to understand and cheaper to modify without changing its observable behaviour”, then surely you only have to watch the deleted scenes on any DVD to realise that movie making involves similar processes.

Centuries of changes in materials and building techniques still result in a bridge but presumably one that is easier to erect, maintain and modify.

If you substitute keywords like “agile” and “refactor” for iterative and refinement then surely it’s more difficult to find examples that don’t follow these same basic principles?

This discussion is closed.

About Matt Linderman

Now: The creator of Vooza, "the Spinal Tap of startups." Previously: Employee #1 at 37signals and co-author of the books Rework and Getting Real.